Knox College

SPEECH BY JOEL POLLAK CANDIDATE FOR CONGRESS NINTH DISTRICT, ILLINOIS KNOX COLLEGE – GALESBURG, IL THURSDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2009, 7:00 PM “The challenge of education in the post-communist era” It is a great privilege to address you here tonight at Knox College, one of the academic gems of Illinois and the Midwest. It is a privilege made greater still by the knowledge that it was here, almost exactly one hundred fifty-one years ago, that Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas held the fifth of their seven debates in the 1858 Senate race. To study the text of that debate is to realize both how much and how little has changed in America. No one today would disagree, as they did, about whether the Declaration of Independence ought to apply to black people as well as white—and if so, to what degree. Today, it is almost hard to believe that was a serious political question. And yet their disagreement about the power of the states relative to the federal government on moral questions remains with us today. Lincoln challenged Douglas directly: the argument for states’ rights is easy, he said, if you do not admit slavery is wrong. But if you do, states’ rights cannot dispose of the issue. We encounter the same difficulty today when we try to tackle the great dividing issues of the “culture war”: school prayer, abortion, gay marriage, and so on. The states’ rights argument is not enough, nor have the federal courts given us satisfactory answers. All we can do is turn to each other in dialogue and debate, as we do here tonight. I am grateful to Rachel Cullin of the Knox College Republicans, and to Kory Atkinson and the Intellectual Diversity Foundation, for making my visit to Knox possible, and for all that they are doing on campus. Most colleges and universities in the United States today believe diversity means a diversity of people alone, rather than a diversity of ideas as well. It may be true, of course, that we are more likely to find different ideas if we assemble students and faculty from as wide a range of backgrounds as possible. But we ought not make the mistake of believing our ideas are the fated products of our origins. Demography is not destiny. We should also remember that ideas do not always exist in a realm of their own—not even in Galesburg—and that there is much that our experiences can teach us about our ideas. Discussions such as this are a special kind of experience, where we can push each other to test our most heartfelt convictions. It is my experience that experiences such as these are all too rare on university campuses—the very place where they should be most natural and ordinary. Therefore I salute the Foundation, the College, and all of you who are here tonight. Other colleges—including Harvard, my alma mater—can learn from your example. When Kory asked me how I wanted to structure the question-and-answer period later this evening, I replied that I wanted it to be open and spontaneous. I am aware that I am here partly because I myself dared to ask a question at a university lecture that dared to give students the

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opportunity. In April, as I was completing my law degree at Harvard, I attended a forum featuring Congressman Barney Frank. I asked him the question that seemed obvious to me but which I had not heard anyone in Washington or the media ask: “How much, if any, responsibility do you have for our financial crisis?” Congressman Frank lost his temper and immediately labeled me as “right wing.” The truth is that I am a Republican today, but in college I was a radical Democrat. And I was just as prone to asking simple but difficult questions then as I am today, even if my perspective has changed. In that same forum, more than ten years ago, I challenged Michael Moore, who had just screened a movie called The Big One about low-wage workers in America. I asked him, quite simply, whether he had paid the interns who had worked on his film. He admitted that he had not, and the audience turned against him. I didn’t ask that question to score political points. I asked it because I had begun to question some of the left-wing orthodoxies I had imbibed in the first two years of my Harvard education. That year, my junior year, I had added environmental science as a major—or concentration, as we called it then. What stunned me about environmental science as a discipline was the thinly-veiled desire for control that seemed to lurk in places—not just control of pollution, but also control of production, control of people’s everyday lives. It contrasted sharply with the spirit of my first major, social studies—which, though certainly leftist, still nurtured something of the romantic desire for emancipation. And so I asked questions. I got involved in left-wing protest movements, but I usually ended up organizing the discussions instead of the demonstrations. It was a deeply exciting and frustrating time for me. Eventually, I concluded that I was not going to find the answers in the library. They might have been there, but I didn’t seem to know what the right questions were. Or perhaps I wasn’t looking in the right places. Of the many disciplines I was interested in, perhaps the one I neglected most was history. Of course I took a few history classes, but my interest was generally in which side was right and which side was wrong, rather than on what actually happened. I believe that is true of most students in our contemporary era. It is telling, though unfortunate, that President Barack Obama has chosen not to attend ceremonies commemorating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall next month. In many of his speeches and gestures, the President cuts against the grain of American norms, but on this occasion he represents the fashion of our age perfectly. Few of us seem to know or care what the events of 1989 meant for the world—or, indeed, for the United States. We fought against communism for two generations, yet we have never managed to commemorate the heroes of that struggle. Nor have we bothered to remind ourselves what we were fighting, or why. I am a member of the first generation to grow up in a post-communist world. At school and university, we were taught little about communism, save for the McCarthy era. The lesson we took from that episode is that it is far worse to accuse someone of being a communist than actually to be one. We went on class trips to the U.S. Holocaust Museum, and learned important lessons about the horrors of fascism and the dangers of bigotry. Yet there is no museum to teach

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America’s youth about the millions who were killed by communists across the world in their insane pursuit of utopia. I ought to have known better. I grew up in Skokie, Illinois, among both Holocaust survivors and Soviet refugees. A distant cousin of mine had been imprisoned in the Gulag for being a Zionist. He later emigrated to Israel and wrote a book about his experiences: he called it Short Stories of the Long Death. But I was swept along with the fashionable skepticism of the 1990s. Not only did we take freedom for granted, we viewed it as a sort of cruel joke played on the poor and the marginalized. What good was freedom without substantive equality? The end of communism left its underlying political impulse fully intact. That impulse—crude in the way it reduces all moral questions to material terms, enduring because greater equality only whets the appetite for further leveling—is the essence of intellectual life in America today. It has escaped the academic world and now occupies the commanding heights of power. We are governed today by the members of two distinct but related cohorts—those of my generation, who are largely ignorant about communism, and those of the generation before, many of whom suspected all along that the fight against communism around the world was merely a tool of oppression at home. What is striking about the emerging authoritarian impulses of the White House—the attacks on Fox News, the attempts to encourage citizens to report each other’s “fishy” views on health care, the singling out of particular interest groups and individuals —is not just that they resemble the practices of communist regimes, but that our leaders seem unaware of that fact. We are witness today to the triumph of Saul Alinsky, who sought in his book Rules For Radicals to separate “revolution” from communism so that communism’s basic instinct—“to use power for a more equitable distribution of the means of life,” in his words—could survive the Cold War and live to fight another day. I, too, might be celebrating Alinsky’s victory today had I not had the opportunity to experience the reality of communist governance firsthand, albeit in rump form, in my native South Africa, where I studied and worked after college and where the hopes of democracy have been thwarted by a power-hungry, corrupt and intolerant ruling party. In South Africa, I learned two critical lessons about the communist impulse. One lesson is that it is a policy disaster: vast increases in government size and power inevitably hurt the people the people they are supposedly intended to benefit. The other is that the communist impulse cannot tolerate truth. It regards truth and democracy as mere instruments, not ends in themselves. These lessons were reinforced when I returned to Harvard to study law. I often argued with classmates and professors who joined the totalitarians of the official international community in accusing the U.S. and Israel of “war crimes,” of gross breaches of international treaties and human rights law in the fight against terror. When we actually examined the text of these laws and treaties, almost invariably the democracies were in the right, and the terror groups and their sponsors in the wrong. At that point the argument always changed: suddenly the critics insisted that international and human rights law were unfair, having been written by strong

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countries to oppress the weak. In the American academy today, questions of right and wrong are questions of weak and strong. The great lesson of the anti-communist struggle and the anti-apartheid struggle and the other worthy causes of the 20th century—that the oppressed must win by moral as well as political strength—has been lost in a fog of forgetfulness and self-doubt. There is only one answer to the challenge of education in the post-communist era, and that is to preserve memory and history from the amnesia the communist impulse demands. Facts form the basis of questions, and questions form the basis of political movements. That is how the Berlin Wall was toppled, and how freedom will survive. I wrote my book, Don’t Tell Me Words Don’t Matter: How Rhetoric Won the 2008 Presidential Election, to preserve the history of our most recent election as I remembered it, as a volunteer writer for the McCain campaign, as a field volunteer in the “swing state” of New Hampshire, and as a Republican on a Democrat campus. I felt a particular sense of urgency about writing that history because of the way Americans seemed to be repeating history. In a time of crisis and uncertainty, we turned to a leader with very little experience and a record of rather extreme views. Throughout history, that has been the formula for democracy’s self-destruction. I thought, before 2008, that left and right had learned some valuable lessons in the postCold War era. I believed, for example, that the difficulty of rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan had taught Republicans just how important the basic functions of government really are to the protection and preservation of freedom. I also believed that the failure of communism and the social welfare state more generally had taught Democrats the folly of big government. Indeed, it was President Bill Clinton himself who declared in 1996: “The era of big government is over.” Yet instead of carrying these lessons into a post-partisan era, we are more divided than we have been in decades. What disturbs me even more than our conflicts over the role of government is our apparent lack of faith in freedom itself. We don’t trust our entrepreneurs to create jobs. We don’t trust democracy enough to defend it in the streets of Tehran. We don’t trust our values to guide us forward through difficult times. Instead of strengthening individuals in general, we have placed our trust in one individual in particular whom many saw as extraordinary, as the embodiment of all that we are and hope for as a nation. Today, we are struggling with the burden of those expectations, and the immense power we have placed at his disposal. The title of my book is taken from one of Obama’s speeches, which he in turn borrowed —or plagiarized—from Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick. It is, I think, a fitting contradiction, because Obama’s words were so important in his rise to power, and yet he has cast aside his promises so easily since taking office. Political rhetoric is always some distance from truth. But there is something pernicious about an attempt to govern through rhetoric alone, especially when the author of that rhetoric claims to have a monopoly on the truth. In those circumstances, shouting “You Lie!” is inappropriate but at the same time almost necessary. George Orwell, one of the great political writers and observers of the last century,

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reminded us of the dangers of abusing words. When Orwell complained about the sloppiness of contemporary English writing—especially in academic and intellectual debate—he wasn’t just making an aesthetic point. Orwell’s fear was that language that is overly complicated can be used to obscure meaning rather than to provide it. And he realized that the power of propaganda was exactly that—the power to weaken the ability of the listener, viewer or reader to exercise independent judgment about what was being said. Josef Stalin knew that very well. He understood that the role of propaganda was not necessarily to convince the public of the merits of a particular idea or policy, but rather to make every other alternative seem ridiculous and in fact unthinkable. Control, not persuasion, was the goal. We face an erosion of words in America today, at the very highest level. The communist impulse thrives when we cannot weigh words against one another, when words lose their force and definition, when all ideas are seen as equal and indistinguishable and are judged largely on the basis of the peculiar interests and identity of the person using them. In these circumstances, our only recourse is the simplest questions and the plainest language. We cannot dismantle the intricate web of restrictions that is presently being spun around our liberty by adding more and more layers of intellectual obfuscation. To do so is to surrender freedom entirely. Rather, we ought to insist on plain language—and on truth, to the extent we can perceive it. The motto of Knox College, like the motto of Harvard College, is “Veritas”—truth. Truth is the ultimate foundation of freedom, because without it we have little control over our own lives, even our own thoughts. And simple language is the guardian of democracy. If we cannot interpret words for ourselves, we are forced to rely on other authorities. That is very reason onethousand-page bills in Congress are so wrong—they force us to rely on government even to know what government is doing. As we explore the complex issues of our day, and the enduring questions of the universe, we cannot ignore the lessons of recent history, nor can we neglect our own individual experiences. Our task as intellectuals is to discover, and teach, complex ideas in plain terms. And our task as citizens is to demand simple answers to simple questions. Freedom itself may depend on it.

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